Blog Exercises: Category Counting

Think of categories and tags this way: Categories are your site’s table of contents. Tags are your index words.

In general, most sites should have 5-12 categories max. Each category should represent a “body of work,” a collection of posts related to a focused topic.

When you find a blog with dozens of categories, what do you assume?

I ask my students and clients this question. They describe such sites with “they can’t make up their minds,” “they cover too many topics,” “maybe a little ADHD” – all types of assumptions pop into their heads. I’m sure those and more occurred to you.

Look at your categories. Are they all over the map covering everything from hair dryers to WordPress? Category lists communicate with visitors. They tell them instantly what information is found here, identifying the relevancy of the site’s material and resources. Not relevant or clear, they are gone.

In our first Blog Exercise the first week of January, we did “Blog Exercise: Category Brainstorming,” an exercise on evaluating your categories. It’s time to review that exercise (and complete the process), and review the topics you blog about the most.

How many do you have? One or Two? Then it might be time to expand.

Such a small number is rare. Most people have 15, 20 even 50 categories. It’s time to dig in and clean up those categories so they send a clear message about the topics you cover.

Remember, 5-12 is an ideal number for the average blogger.

If you blog about this, remember to include a hat tip link back to this post to create a trackback, or leave a properly formed link in the comments so participants can check out your blog exercise task.

10 Comments

I found this post to be very useful in understanding the real difference between categories and tags. TBH, there has been some confusion in my mind at times and this post is now bookmarked ‘in-case-of’ me forgetting or getting confused again. Thanks for all your posts – I always read them. You guys are two of my favourite bloggers🙂

This just made me look at my categories to see how many I have, and I have 13 (not including ‘uncategorized’ which I never use), one of which – I realised with shock – I’ve only used once and it was on a post of a type I’d intended to do once a month!

I mostly categorize according to type of content and also I mention if the image in it is art or photo (I’m an artist, primarily).

Your site is focused on baby names, how to choose, stories and history, and fads and trends in naming children.

Why not consider subcategories, grouping like topics together, to help your readers find the information they need.

“How to Choose a Name” could have “Picking a Baby Name” and “Need Baby Name Help” and “Name Studies” and “Name Predictions” under it. “Picking a Name” and “Need Help” sound the same to me so those might be combined as well. I’d really like to see a link in your top menu to these excellent “how to choose” articles as well rather than having them buried way down in the sidebar and footer. They are tremendous articles. Maybe a Page linking to all the articles as a reference web page?

“Baby Name History” or some scientific word for the naming of people (I’m sure there is such a word, if not, there should be so make one up 😀 ) could have Baby Name Definitions, Stories, in the News, Pop Culture, Popular, Questions Mysteries Polls, etc.

By grouping the content within sub-categories, it might make it feel like you are treating your site professionally as it is more structured, educational if you will. It would also make the long list easier to read, and could help your SEO as the urls would have the parent category as well as the subcategory in them.

You are doing amazing work on the subject of naming, but I didn’t discover that until I really dug into your site more. At first glance, it looks a little commercial and spammy, but you are really passionate about the naming game. Fantastic articles. Topical, creative, educational, and in many cases inspired. This isn’t a full site review but think about first impression over content reality. I’d really love to see you show your stuff better so you are really viewed as an expert in the subject. This is some brilliant stuff you do!